Follow-up: The Trashing of the People's Library

Via WP:

Today, Occupy Wall Street held a news conference about the library, and reported that 79 percent of books were missing or wrecked. The remaining books are reportedly in the condition pictured at left. Occupy’s attorney is demanding that the city replace every missing book.

I think there's definitely a question here about whether the property of a collective is just as respected as the property of individuals. I think it's a damn good question, too, because of how "search and seizure" protections have been weakened by, in turn, the war on drugs and the war on terror, and the erosion of respect for the idea of "the commons".  Think about being patted down by the TSA and having your bags rooted through when you travel, or how local government is being increasingly privatized--what can you call yours as an individual?  And what can we--as a city, state, country, or even just a collective, call "ours"? Is there any property rights a regular person has that a government entity might respect?

That's part of why the People's Library has become the symbol it has--it can stand in for all of the many ways in which our Bill of Rights' freedoms are nibbled away at, disregarded--not even articulated. The raid on Zuccotti Park to break up a peaceful protest touches on the rights of people to speech and peacable assembly, the arrests of journalists impinges on the freedom of the press. But the trashing of the books is a tangible thing that can be shown and discussed.  Every book like a small world in itself of ideas. All these books, wrecked.  A library book is a world that can be shared by every person who can read it. It's not like those books aren't out there, in other editions, in other libraries or book stores to be re-acquired. But the idea was that they were picked out by the donors and by happy chance and by choices and in many cases because of their relevance to the cause--and that matters.

It matters because it matters to OWS, and those who support it, and people who appreciate their rights and think about what a raid like that, and the destruction of property like that, might actually mean for other people or all of us, collectively.